


Fruits of Mercy

by EmmG



Category: Dishonored (Video Games)
Genre: Character Study, F/M, Low Chaos
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-02-06
Updated: 2017-02-06
Packaged: 2018-09-22 08:10:52
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,327
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9595253
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/EmmG/pseuds/EmmG
Summary: Each Lady Boyle handles Corvo's mercy differently. Only one finds her way out.





	

**Author's Note:**

> The three Boyle sisters are very different characters. This is just me filling in blanks on how they would handle Corvo's mercy and Brisby's "rescue." Waverly is considered the canonical Lady Boyle, we know that, but the other two sisters are just as interesting.

**i**

_esma_ —she drinks to forget herself

This is who she is: the one who laughs the loudest and smiles brightest. She is not like clever Waverly nor gifted like—poor, plain, utterly simply, but oh she’ll keep that on the tip of her tongue and let her eyes tattle instead for it is infinitely crueler—Lydia. She does not play the harpsichord and knows not how to balance the books.

But she is _brilliant_.

She is a vision in emerald and a striking figure in cerulean. Her hair is pale and her eyes are piercing. She smiles, ever pleasant, while one sister fretfully plots and the other masters yet another instrument.

She catches so many eyes—and wouldn’t it be so very wicked to have them gouged and each given a jar—that it’s easy to lose track.

She doesn’t remember the one who kissed her hand a night prior and proved so charming. She had Tyvian Sherry, so sweet it wipes anyone’s mind.

She recalls little of the one who asked for the first dance, then returned for the third and later claimed the fifth. Her head spun, spun, spun and that vile Dunwall-bred whiskey still burns the back of her throat.

She can’t rightly recognize her—dead—daughter’s father in a crowd. The cider fountain failed to run dry that night.

She dreams of stars and finds them in diamonds. Her nails are lacquered. She likes to paint her lips red. Servants pour endless vials of jasmine oil into her bathwater.

Stunning, frivolous, statuesque Esma Boyle, whose lips are never dry and hands ever trembling, can’t refuse them all. And so she watches as Waverly tends to the finances and frail-minded Lydia practices a Serkonian canzonetta. Three sisters. One shall keep the estate running; one shall be kept safe in simplicity and envy, never truly realizing that neither beauty nor intelligence are true assets in this time; and one will bed the Lord Regent.

 _It’s good for the family_ , Waverly remarks before the onset of a fresh bout of melancholy.

 _How appalling_ , Lydia whispers—but she means whorish, she always means whorish, though she never says it aloud just as Esma never calls her plain.

She smiles so prettily that Burrows has her painted by none other than Sokolov himself.

“Even if I painted you from the back, none could rival you,” he says in that peculiar Tyvian accent of his, holding up a hand to her hair as if a simple touch could stripe it of its color so he may lend it to his canvass. "Would you like to be a mystery?"

She turns to face another work of his, another beautiful face immortalized by a master’s hand. The woman wears white too. It is a good color on her, but Esma was never meant for ivory.

There are things she’ll never tell anyone for Waverly would scold her and Lydia turn her nose up. How difficult it is to smile—and kiss and touch and pretend—for a man who knows he can’t be refused without consequences. She can stall his hand now, and she can enjoy one more pained breath in her whalebone corset, because he calls her his love.

She’ll stand where the last Empress fell and enjoy a view of the garden, he says over a glass of sparkling white. As if walking on dried blood is a treat. Jessamine died amongst asphodels. Flowers thrive on dead flesh, but spring is a lifetime away.

And she smiles as money changes hands, financing a man who promised much but does little.

And she smiles some more because a servant taught her to chew on coffee beans to mask the aftertaste of liquor.

It is ivory she dons as well the night of the Boyle masquerade. She scoffs at the love letter and the skeleton key attached to it. Tonight is hers alone. She could be either one of her sisters behind the mask. She could be the clever one, the one with the bell-like voice—anyone, anyone at all but flirty Esma, a drink in her hand at all hours and a fatherless, but motherless as well, child in a nameless grave.

Perhaps she’ll kiss the tall lion leaning by the fireplace. Or wet her lips with red, red wine and let the wolf in the parlor finally have a taste of scarlet. So many choices and all hers.

Beads of black ice pin her in place across the reception hall—but no it is merely onyx and it isn’t truly a face, merely a mask, mangled and frightening. She lifts the porcelain covering her lips, downs her flute of champagne, and graciously invites a perfect stranger upstairs.

He talks little, but she likes them that way. She loves that he knows there’s no need to put on an act for her. So many do, expecting something in return.

He talks so little in fact that she misses the moment he decides to crush her windpipe. The world is oddly beautiful when all air is taken away. This is not how she planned to give away control.

She never sees his face again. What little face he had, anyway.

Then, another takes his place.

He says she was to be murdered that night, the man with the fidgety hands and the upsetting mask. He assures he is single-handedly responsible for stepping between her and Dunwall’s reaper. He claims so many good deeds to his name, but there is one word which never fails to thieve its way into each of his sentences.

Love, love, love.

She tries, clumsy and disoriented, to throw herself overboard the little boat but an aether-soaked handkerchief gets in the way.

“Lord Timothy Brisby,” he tells her his name as they’re away from land once more.

Her cabin door is locked and the window glass too thick to break through. There is nothing but the distant song of whales and her missing shoe.

“I do not know you,” she lies, feeling her exposed toes go cold.

A pathetic name, in her previous life.

The only name, in her new one.

“We’ve danced.”

“I’ve danced with many men.”

“And oftentimes with me.”

He tries to cover her hand with his, but she is still fashionable Lady Boyle and her nails quite sharp. She has no file now—they’ll break off, and so will she. But for now, what she lacks in strength her mind makes up in motivation. His cheek is marked as she strikes him, a mildly satisfying sight.

“The Winter Ball at the royal palace,” he begins. “You wore a midnight blue gown and your hair was loose. I asked you to the floor as soon as you entered and you did not deny me. Not the first time, not the second, not the last.”

Insistent fingers, running up her sides likes spiders. Breath caught at the back of the throat. Husky, shaky laughter. A hold on her too strong to be considered decent during a waltz. Pitiful attempts at conversation. Quick, unblinking eyes following her across the ballroom as if she were the only sun to ever shine.

She remembers, of course, even through the fog of alcohol.

Lovesick fools came to her by a dozen, but this is no fool. For the first time, Esma Boyle feels something other than self-imposed apathy.

He acts very much the savior, even when she hits him. Benevolence shouldn’t come at a cost.

_(She curses the one who deemed her worthy of mercy.)_

He takes her to an estate with walls as tall as three men perched upon each other’s shoulders. It must be by the sea for the breeze carries a hint of salt.

_(She wonders if the man in the skull mask knew she’d never be able to climb it with her nails.)_

He says she’ll lack for nothing, but there is only so much room within this gilded prison.

_(She fantasizes about the day the pearl choker finally suffocates her.)_

She is not good with words like Waverly and all her letters end up as fuel for the fire—not that any would have ever made it past the walls. She is not talented like Lydia—she can’t entertain herself by playing this season’s tunes until her fingertips are raw and bleeding from abusing the piano keys.

She’s Esma. Haughty Esma who will never make it past the garden hedge yet still dresses like a queen.

She’s not surprised that Burrows doesn’t inquire after her. She isn’t saddened that her sisters don’t use their far reach to learn of her fate.

_(It should hurt that she expected all of that.)_

On her vanity jewelry boxes multiply by the day, it seems, while in the mirror her face grows paler and her hair longer.

There’s only him, only his devotion and never, never, never blinking eyes. Outsider help any woman who is loved this way, but he is here and her sisters aren’t.

She drinks bitter tea in his company, barely able to control the tremors in her hands, and wishes it were wine.

“Perhaps a game of chess?” Brisby proposes.

The pieces are fine, hand-crafted. She twirls a knight of whalebone, watching with distant fascination as candlelight bounces off its polished surface.

“You cannot move it at this time, dear,” his voice breaks through her sudden concentration.

“I wish for wine.”

He tugs at his collar, uncomfortable. “Perhaps not just now.”

He should want her insensate. Always, a line formed to refill her glass. The band no longer plays, there is no dance floor, and her vision is too clear. She wants to hit him again—scar his face so badly he’ll truly require a mask—but doesn’t trust her hands.

She understands now, at least she thinks, why everyone was always so keen to see her in white. She appears a waif easy to claim. She is not the color of coal, but wishes very much she were.

It’s very simple, she understands during a rare moment of sobriety. She’s a thing abandoned but not forgotten. As long as Brisby is here, she’ll always linger like a restless phantom.

She is only pretty Esma Boyle, good for enticing, courting favors and fucking her way out of anything.

Her hair reaches her collarbone. That is how she knows time has passed.

She breaks the nails on both of her thumbs trying to pick the lock to the massive front double doors in the dark of night. That is how she accepts she’s at the end of her tether.

She forgets adorning her ears with diamonds three days in a row. That is how she knows she is about to lose herself.

Beautiful Esma. Her father had so many prospects for her before his untimely demise.

Beautiful Esma. She who caught the eye of a man who nearly brought a nation to ruin.

That’s it. That’s all. She is not a composition of Lydia’s, meant to outlive the dust of old bones. People will whisper _Esma_ and some will say _harlot_ , others _beauty_ , until the name brings about only a confused _who_. The portrait of the forgotten vision—Vera Moray, scribbled at the back—still sits gathering not only admiration but dust as well, a prized item of the Boyle collection. The oil chipped long ago, the canvass dried, and it became something more of an antique than tribute. She'll be like that too, in flesh and paint alike.

Sokolov painted a mystery.

She doesn’t want to be forgotten.

He says her name like a prayer when he fucks her for the first time. She doesn’t know what to expect, but her heart misses a beat when nothing changes the following morning.

It was always a pattern. Drink, fuck, get something out of it. The change is disorientating.

How many days before the mirror fails to be agreeable? How much time before her skin is no porcelain but chalk?

She doesn’t flinch when he touches her nor turns away when he smiles. She lets him escort her to the dinner table, hand holding her elbow, while his idle chatter fills the air. Just as she lets him undress her and whisper tainted words of love into her skin.

“I adore you,” he tells her.

“I know,” she replies, reaching for the crystal carafe before remembering it’s filled to the brink with cool water.

“We have time.”

That’s the worst of it, truly. The arrows move, sand trickles out of the hourglass, but this constant state of purgatory remains.

There are changes, of course. Her fingertips really are bloody and raw. She hasn’t stopped trying to pick locks around the estate without any knowledge whatsoever. Her various corsets gather dust—they are so hard to unlace, such a hassle, and she wants her time with him to be brief.

The paper stops coming following Hiram Burrows’ assassination.

Esma Boyle never had any friends, but now she knows she’s run out of allies.

There are other changes, too. The thickening of her waist. The lethargy.

Somewhere, in plague-assaulted Dunwall, rests a child whose birth—and death—caused her so much pain she lay bleeding for months.

_(There will be no more children—an order, not a statement. The doctor who pulled her out of the Void had been a harsh man, not one to mince words.)_

Something in her chest releases. Her lungs have remained cluttered for too long. She can breathe—she can taste the sea salt of the breeze wafting through her window and the oils on her vanity.

She’ll never see the sea.

Time is no longer still.

She chooses a pair of sapphire earrings.

Absently, Esma Boyle works on the fastenings while staring at the white sheets of her bed. They will be bloody soon enough.

She isn’t knowledgeable or skilled, but she is beautiful and Brisby will remember her as such.

Genius and beauty are the only qualities to know immortality.


End file.
